3D-Pangel

I would assume by soft body interactions that the particles are spheres or blobs of some sort and/or you going for a type of bubble look? If so, I do recall a YouTube video from Insydium as part of their XP4 2018 Sneak Peek where Bob Walmsley applied an xpCloth modifier to a sphere, added some xpTurbulence and other modifiers and got this very cool looking softbody type animation (without the overhead that true softbody dynamics can give you). He did it as a demo and was surprised at quality of the results. I can't remember which YouTube tutorial it was as it wasn't labeled as "how to make bubbles using cloth" but rather part of a feature overview. You could ask at the Insydium forums. I hope that helps. Dave

I am not sure how many particles you are generating, but I am just wondering what you want to edit/keyframe outside of the native controls in X-Particles that makes you want to bake the particle animation? XP has some pretty good controls for insuring you are getting the desired particle motion. If you are only dealing with a small amount of particles, then maybe just use MoGraph. I can't imagine going through the keyframes on very high particle count animations that is possible with X-Particles (eg. many hundreds, thousands or even millions). Now, if you want to cache the particle animation for quicker feedback and to scrub the animation back and forth, then use the xpCache object under the Other Objects tab. You can either drag in the emitter or the generator depending on what you still want to be able to change after the file is cached.

OMG.....Okay...you know I am a huge fan of Ragdolls 3. In fact, today was a bit rough and I thought I would go view Ragdolls 3 again to raise my spirits. And lo-and-behold, there is Ragdolls 4 ….. and it was funnier than Ragdolls 3 (….."oh my colon....oh my ankle"....that line killed me). I know I have been traveling a lot (122,000 miles in 2018....or over 8 days sitting in an airplane)….but how did I miss the release of Ragdolls 4!!! In any case, thank you...thank you...thank you. Just brilliant! Dave P.S. You should have a banner "25,458 Ragdolls injured...and counting" P.P.S The fluids in Ragdolls 4...was it X-Particles? I did not see it listed in the credits.

I wonder if the new Fields capability was in view when the academy was voting? I had a chance to play with it this weekend and was absolutely impressed. Not sure what the timing was between R20 release and the nominations (if they even have them for technical awards)….but I wonder if fields factored into the award or not. It would be interesting to know. Overall though, the entire MAXON team deserves an award (IMHO). R20 has really delivered on all fronts. I am so behind on my WIPs, but there is just so much to learn in R20 and time is very limited for a hobbyist. The priority goes to learning. Plus, I have made a commitment to really grow my X-Particles 4 skills as the speed improvements with the latest release and the new capabilities really make it an exciting package....actually, X-Particles should get its own little Oscar. I also anticipate that spending more time on learning new capabilities than on finishing WIP's will be the norm for a while as the new core continues to permeate everything in the program over the next couple of releases. All I can say is this: Hrvoje was right! I privately scoffed at some of his "just wait and see what's coming" comments in the past....but he was right! Dave

I came across this in my travels and thought it was pretty interesting: https://www.linkedin.com/company/maxon3d/ It shows the location of all their offices and the LinkedIn pages of all their employees across the world (99 in total - though not all are full time employees). Some LinkedIn pages leave out the name but not their position. Overall, pretty interesting as I have always wondered just how many people work for MAXON. It is larger than I thought. Dave

Wow....no one responded to this news after almost a month? When you consider past winners of the Academy Technical awards (Ed Catmull, Houdini, Nuke, Photoshop, etc.), MoGraph stands with some pretty notable contributors to the industry. This is quite the achievement. Hopefully, in time, they post the awards ceremony on YouTube. That would be kind of cool to see. Congratulations Per-Anders Edwards! Well deserved. Dave

More deals from CGAxis: Was $149 now only $19. Learn more here: I tripped over their site, saw one of their collections for $9 and purchased it. Ever since then, I have been notified of their flash sales. Just being on their mailing list is a good thing! Dave

CG Axis provides models in C4D format and textures. I think they may be in financial trouble as they are really slashing their prices in a series of 24 hour flash sales (eg. $99 model collections for $9). Their latest is pretty significant: Over 500 PBR textures for $39 (normally priced at $745). I can't speak for their quality, but you can read more about it here It will expire in 1 day (12/27/2018). Dave

I would agree that MAXON would have to do a tremendous job to catch up to X-Particles. It really rounds out MAXON as given their price range it is a bit surprising that their native physical simulation capabilities are a bit limited. But here Insydium fills that void nicely with fluids, cloth, etc. So I would not be surprised if TP development into the new core does not go beyond what they have today. I mean, why bother? It would be about as useless as updating Pyrocluster. In fact, to include TP with future updates as the new core continues to be rolled out would be a bit of an embarrassment for MAXON. Kind of like updating/remodeling an entire house but one room still has these olive green shag carpets. Particle animation is a big part of motion graphics and MAXON not only failed to invest in it, but lost a key developer who went off with his own vision for how it should be done and did them one better by introducing physical simulations into motion graphics. But MAXON would never drop their price. To do so would be a public admission that they really missed the mark and now need an "outsider" to help them catch up. ….but as I think about it... What could happen is that Nemetscheck acquires Insydium but still allows them autonomy and control. They just run as a separate division along side MAXON and the two get sold together as a bundle (hopefully at a reduced price). In fact, I would not be surprised if this was the plan all along when David O'Reilly left as sometimes you need to "spin out" a development team with the intent of some day acquiring them and spin them back in. Spinning them out allows them to be develop autonomously which usually also means faster and more creatively. Just a thought. Dave

No....not a weird mathematical equation but a legitimate question. In the past 12 weeks, I have spent 9 of them traveling for work: 8 of those 9 weeks have been out of the country. So this left very little time for C4D. Plus TV was a not a great option given some of the countries I was visiting. So all I can say is Thank God for YouTube! So I started watching the Insydium tutorials on X-Particles, in particular those that highlight the features of their November, 2018 release. Based on a brief search through the forums I am really surprised that no one at the Café has posted on this release because I am just gob struck by the improvements made by Insydium. Just watch Bob Walmsley's IBC presentation here and tell me if you don't start the see the potential for XP4-2018 as part of major VFX pipepline. The multi-physics capabilities and grain solvers really blow my mind. Add to that the general speed increase (around 3X faster fluid solver), the capability to cache various fluid channels as OpenVDB output, and mix all that with R20 fields and you begin to wonder if the complexity of the Houdini interface is really buying you that much. You may think that Houdini has the edge on handling massive particles and therefore is the only way to go for serious VFX work. But if you watch other YouTube videos where they were running speed comparison tests with over 1.5 million particles on a Core i9 processor you may also question that assumption as well. Now, I have absolute respect for the work done with Houdini and for the artists who use it, but I think it is a mistake for people to think that C4D users can't play in the high-end VFX world. X-Particles allows C4D users to step out of the motion graphics box that many non-C4D users like to keep us in. Bravo! Dave

Interesting......thanks for sharing. I did not listen to the audio as I am in an airport (killing time until my next flight) and probably couldn't hear it anyway. The spreadsheet looks like a numerical representation of the animation curves for each object. If you notice, you can scroll left or right within each cell and the object's position updates accordingly. Not too much different than what you have today. The spreadsheet is just an early version of the animation tracks showing the keyframes and you right click on each keyframe to get their numerical values. Also, at that time, Pixar's animation software was home grown. I say "at that time" as I am not sure if their animation software (I think it is called "Marionette") has been replaced by something commercially available. Dave

To get the bluish glow, place a volumetric omni light at the center of the planet. Turn off shadows, illumination, etc. Color it blue and grow it get the atmospheric glow you are looking for. I used that method for this image below. You are also going to want a Fresnel shader on the planets surface as well, tinted brown probably, to get the effect of atmospheric haze towards the horizon. Dave

While I support the request for more affordable educational software licenses, I find nothing in your argument that justifies pirating software. A starving person stealing a loaf of bread to survive is one thing, but C4D is a luxury. Having it fulfills no basic minimum human need. By itself, C4D does not provide warmth, shelter or food. It is a want, and not a need. No one is "entitled" to it...plain and simple. If they are stealing it, it is through greed and nothing more. And don't give me the argument that they could use it to make money. To be able to earn some income from it requires weeks if not years of training, dedication, practice and skill. You don't just steal it on Monday, open a business with it on Tuesday and start eating again on Wednesday. Sorry, they are not stealing it to put food on the table. They just want it and as such I cannot justify any reason that makes its theft acceptable. Now, I firmly believe that in all options for providing hobbyist or educational licenses, MAXON needs to generate some income. I posted previously that hobbyist licenses should be resolution limited and there was push back. Honestly, as a hobbyist, the most you should hope for is being able to render something that looks good on your PC's screen. You do not need print or HD resolutions if you are a hobbyist. If you want higher resolution, buy the full license. Asking MAXON to offer the full package at a reduced price without reduced features is not a long term path to financial success for MAXON. ...and believe it or not....I want MAXON to be financially successful. I want them to have enough cash to be here for the long term and hire top notch developers to continually grow the program. Yes...I am a hobbyist and about 6 to 10 years from retirement. C4D is going to be a big part of my retirement years so MAXON better be around for at least 40 more years until I am either too blind to see the monitor or too arthritic to hold the mouse! if not, I am coming for you Dave....I am coming for you!!!! Dave

Some great and detailed points made in this forum. What I would like to lend my support for changing: Not being penalized for missing an upgrade. Honestly, I believe this will generate more sales than it losses as people hate feeling locked in to anything. Also, there have been many times where the majority of new features in a release don't benefit Studio users but I upgrade anyway because the cost NOT to upgrade is higher.....now that is feeling trapped! Special reduced pricing for hobbyists. Limit the output resolution for hobbyist licenses to no more than 1280 x 720 and remove net render capabilities, but other than that keep all features intact. A few new ideas: A customer loyalty program of some sort. If you have faithfully been a customer for X consecutive years and kept your MSA current each year, then your maintenance price in the X+1 year should be discounted. You would need this incentive if you allowed people to miss upgrades without being penalized. The temporary license fees are (IMHO) too high if they are geared towards those who have previous licenses, did not upgrade but need a new feature for a short period of time. For example, the Studio three month short term license is $600...which is about equal to the $750 annual MSA price. If you are one license behind but cannot afford the MSA for the next version, this option makes no sense - there are cheaper options with better benefits. For those who are only 1 revision behind, that temporary license cost should be significantly reduced and viewed as a more affordable way to pay the MSA in installments (eg. $225 every 3 months - $900 total for the year - only $150 more than the MSA price). All-in-all, I agree with all the comments made here. MAXON pricing needs some work. Dave

Well this is a first. Anyone having trouble with their temporary serial numbers? I keep getting a message that the SN provided in the same email with the link for digital delivery is invalid. Straight copy and paste and even passing it through a text file to insure there are no hidden and/or embedded characters at the beginning or end of the serial number from the email does not help. Running Start.exe as a system administrator does not help either Other than filing a case with MAXON support and reaching out to MAXON-USA (who are just phenomenally fast), what else can I do? ...and here I was just thinking that C4D is the application I want to grow old with....and it rejects me. ...how sad. Dave

I am using the Physical render. Render times are pretty long (around 30 minutes on a 4 core 3.7GHz Xeon E3-1245 V6 processor). For all but close ups the port hole luminance maps do not need to be GI enabled which they are right now. Turning that off could speed things up a bit. I am not really worried about polygon count. I used to be, but computers are so powerful these days it is not that much of a limitation. The whole project has been slowed down a bit due to work (traveling to Juarez, San Jose, back to Juarez and then to the Czech republic on business) and family (lots of great weekends spent with pretty much everyone). Also, a very good comment was made Vizn about the paneling that has got me going back a bit to redo. It is more work than expected, but he was spot on. Put all that together and progress has been slow. I hope to get to spend a bit of time on it this weekend before my next trip. My perfect retirement job (hopefully 7 years away) would be to do something (anything actually) with C4D as I find myself really looking forward to being able to spend some serious time on it....but time for my hobbies is so limited right now. Dave

I do see relationships in how the core is being implemented. For example, with OpenVDB implementation and the complete lack of any improvements to C4D's native particle system, I would not be surprised that a fluid simulation capability is somewhere on the roadmap with a new particle system capable of supporting it. But all that WON'T happen until the core is turned lose and C4D can handle massive quantities of objects. But fields had to come first....and just imagine what would be possible with fluid simulation being governed by fields. I would say it would give Realflow's daemons a run for their money. Unfortunately, August 20XX is such a long way away....so please MAXON, give us some insights!!! Dave

Okay....I have been watching a few more videos on R20 and it is beginning to sink in that this is a pretty significant release. Also, you need to look at R20 as follows: the sum of the parts is so much greater than the whole. If we only think about fields, material nodes, volume modeling in the traditional sense, then you are understating what those features mean to R20 because their implementation by MAXON throughout the entire architecture of the program just seems pretty brilliant and well thought out. If this is what the new core gets us in the future for other features, then I need to learn a greater level of patience - which will be hard but I am confident it will be worth the wait. I have also been thinking about the delays in Bodypaint. UV management is at the core of the program as it touches modeling, texturing and rendering. As such, I honestly think that it will be last on the release pipeline not because it is low priority by MAXON but because it has to be with respect to all the other features they need to implement. If new features are going to have the same level of integration that we are seeing in R20 due to the new core, then it just makes sense for Bodypaint to be close to the last thing to be implemented because UV editing touches so many other areas. Think of it this way: do you put up the curtains in a home while the building is still being framed? Same idea. There is a logical order to how things need to get done and MAXON is definitely logical. It is a no win situation for MAXON given their current culture because they can't explain why the most anticipated feature update is going to be at the tail end of their implementation pipeline unless they divulge what is coming before it. They also can't say it is a high priority --- because even though it may be a high priority in their development workload it will still need to be implemented after most everything else they have planned. So statements about priority will seem pretty hollow as we are kept waiting. That is just the way it is. Thus the eternal tap dance on the part of the MAXON employees. They want to scream out that it will be worth the wait but even statements like those beg more questions on when? and why? and how come not now? because to answer any of those questions gets into the order in which features and capabilities need to be released and that is an area MAXON will not go. So they stay quiet. Maybe that will change with the new CEO and we can only hope. Dave

So the annual deal offered prior to a release that if you upgrade from R18 to R19 you get R20 now includes 1 year of MSA? That is a good deal. If there was a guarantee that was offered every year, I would seriously think about skipping MSA's every other year. Dave.

Cool. I would imagine the good folks at GSG are busily looking at their Signal plugin right now!

Okay....I am beginning to see the light. Spline based modifications has many interesting applications and possibilities. Not sure how much better control time field modifications provides for simple field applications than keyframing, but I would imagine that for complex field set-ups, they provide a huge value. Can you drive them with a midi soundtrack as well? That capability might drive 3D-Kiwi back into C4D. ; -) Can time fields also apply to the settings in lights as well? For example could they control intensity such that you can now create animated chaser lights without the need for Xpresso or tedious key-framing. A bit of a stretch as I would imagine it was designed around polygonal objects, but it would be pretty cool if that was possible . Dave

Did you mean that MAXON waivered the cost increase to MSA's for this year (and only to MAXON USA customers) or did I seriously miss something?

Thank you....if it is selection tag based, then I would imagine that it won't work with primitives. No biggee, just wondering. I would love to see a video on how fields can be used in a polygonal modeling workflow.....not that you probably don't already have a "few" requests for tutorials. But this could help change the perception that "modeling" improvements were not fully addressed in this release. Dave

I have been watching a few of the fields videos. After one example, there was a post that said that they would work with OpenVDB meshes. If true, then would they also work with standard meshes (that is, take action on the individual polygons in that mesh)? Will they work with primitives such that you now have a completely non-destructive workflow? Just wondering if fields will give you more control and options than with the current set of deformation brushes in C4D. Dave

Thanks for the clarification as I just assumed it was just breathing hard